Bankers working on the listing of SB Energy spent much of last week trying to fill an order book that never quite filled. By Monday, the SoftBank-backed data center developer had decided to postpone an initial public offering it had hoped to complete this month, according to people familiar with the matter.
The problem was not a lack of ambition. SB Energy had sought a valuation of roughly $50 billion for a company that has yet to bring a single data center online. The bankers managing the deal struggled to find enough investors willing to buy shares at the price range the company and its underwriters were targeting, the people said.
The delay makes SB Energy the second company in the space of a week to pull back from a listing tied to the artificial-intelligence infrastructure boom. Nuclear power supplier Holtec International, which had hoped to sell electricity to data centers, postponed its own debut by at least three months last Wednesday.
SB Energy sits at the center of Masayoshi Son’s AI wager. The developer, backed by SoftBank Group as well as OpenAI and Nvidia, is building what it describes as the world’s largest data center project in Ohio, with much of the capacity leased to OpenAI over a long-term contract.
The company began life as SoftBank’s renewable-energy arm, developing solar and wind projects in the United States and Japan. It has since repositioned itself around the market for the computing power that AI developers need, a pivot that put it directly in the path of the same investor demand that has lifted chipmakers and cloud providers to record valuations.
The company’s reliance on a single anchor customer sits at the center of investor unease. Its prospectus acknowledged that it is substantially dependent on OpenAI, and that fulfilling its current contracts will require roughly $174 billion of investment, funded largely through project-level debt. That is a heavy ask for a company with no operating revenue from completed facilities.
Nvidia’s involvement deepened just hours before the delay became public. SB Energy said in filings that the chipmaker had doubled its investment, buying $1.5 billion worth of shares at a 10 percent discount to the eventual listing price, taking its total commitment to about $3 billion. Nvidia has separately agreed to provide up to $105 billion in backstop funding for SB Energy’s Pike County, Ohio campus, which is leased to OpenAI for two decades.
That gesture was not enough to steady the order book. Investors have grown wary of companies whose value rests on assumptions about how much computing power the world will need, particularly after OpenAI and Anthropic recently pledged to slow the development of their most advanced models for safety reasons. Slower model development, the reasoning goes, could mean less demand for the compute that data centers sell.
The hesitation extends beyond any single company. Analysts said the retreat reflects a broader cooling in the market for AI infrastructure, which until recently seemed able to price almost any project at a premium. Political backlash against data center construction in several U.S. states has added a layer of uncertainty that lenders and equity investors are now pricing in.
For SoftBank, the delay is an awkward pause in a financing campaign that has already stacked more than $20 billion of new debt and equity commitments behind its AI ambitions. Son has staked the group’s reputation on the belief that AI will reshape the global economy, and SB Energy was meant to be one of the vehicles through which that conviction reaches public markets.
People familiar with the situation said SB Energy still intends to pursue a listing and is assessing market conditions, weighing a debut perhaps in mid-October. The New York Times and the Financial Times first reported the postponement, citing people familiar with the company’s plans. The company also holds talks with investors on a potential debt sale tied to the listing, though early discussions suggest buyers expect a yield of around 10 percent, a level that implies junk-rated credit risk.
The postponement stands in contrast to the reception given to Nscale, a British AI cloud provider backed by Nvidia, which filed for a New York listing on Monday at a target valuation of up to $35 billion. That the two companies could file within hours of each other and meet such different receptions underscores how quickly investor sentiment toward AI infrastructure has fragmented.
For now, the order book remains open in spirit if not in fact. SB Energy has told investors it will try again when sentiment toward data centers stabilizes. Whether that moment arrives in weeks or months will depend on how quickly the market regains confidence that the demand for AI computing will keep growing at the pace its builders have promised.
